The Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art is pleased to invite you to KINO for an evening with the Brussels-based production and distribution platform Auguste Orts, founded in 2006 by Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen, Manon de Boer and Anouk De Clerq. The four artists, who all individually work predominately with the moving image, describe their practice as ‘…at the crossroads of cinema, video, audiovisual arts, documentaries, experimental films… where media and disciplines cross-fertilize each other.’ Closely collaborating with the organization’s director Marie Logie and business director Ann Goossens on facilitating both the production and distribution of their own projects, Auguste Orts attempts to address a wider discourse through supporting other artists (so-called guest productions) and occasionally organizing talks and screening programs.

Herman Asselberghs and Marie Logie have chosen to present two films at KINO, Asselberghs’s For Now (2017) and Fairuz & El Moïz Ghammam’s Oumoun (2017), the Dutch premiere for both.

For Now
Herman Asselberghs, video, color, 4:3, stereo, Dutch spoken (Eng. St), BE, 2017, 32’
In times of great turmoil, time comes to a standstill.
The central two movements in For Now are horizontal panoramas shots and firm, vertical edits. They show shifts of place without the journey. Nature, the wind, movement that occurs all on its own: this would seem to be the film’s real subject matter. The film unfolds in waves. Locations come and go, and come back again – Lewinsky Park, Maximilian Park, Habima Square, Lion Square, Zucotti Park, Times Square or pastoral landscapes at opposite ends of the Mediterranean Sea. The actions are the same: people wait, pass by, kill time. The contrasts between refugees and citizens, between tourists and activists, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Europeans and Americans, all become less clear. The repetition of these unclarified relationships, Asselberghs’ decisively filming after the fact, the enigmatic inclusion of hand signals – all these work together to reveal a certain constellation in which things again come together momentarily before taking their leave. It is a film running alongside the events, and alongside time. A contemporary film in the pure sense of the word – a way of being with time.

Oumoun
Fairuz & El Moïz Ghamman, BE/TN, 2017, 14’
A dialogue across languages, across cultures, across generations.
‘Dear grandma, you’ll be surprised to hear my voice in your language…’ Those are the first words in a prerecorded, spoken letter never sent but instead played aloud in real time by the Brussels filmmaker to her elderly grandmother in Mahdia, Tunisia. In the company of the camera, the lines easily turn into a voice over that, merely by listening and looking attentively, in turn gradually transforms into a dialogue across languages, across cultures, across generations.